Download - German Historical Institute London

British–German Relations since 1945
sources in many European archives. In any case, the editors are content
to close a gap in the literature which they see in the lack of an
interdisciplinary treatment by historians and social scientists of the
bilateral relationship between the two countries in the European context.
To fill this gap, they have divided the book into three sections.
The first deals with the bilateral relations between Britain and West
Germany as well as the GDR between the end of the Second World
War and German unification in 1989–90. The four essays in the second
section address the importance of institution-building and foreign
and security policy for Britain and Germany during the 1990s.
The third section, finally, concerns the economic and social questions
of industrial modernization, economic policy-making, and social
engineering at a time of increasing globalization. The latter, rather
than the conventional security issues, have so far dominated the
political agenda of the European Union and its member states. Thus
a multinational framework of analysis seems especially appropriate.
The first essay, by Anne Deighton, gives a reliable overview of the
relationship between Britain and West Germany until British accession
to the European Communities. She argues, with some justification,
that British and West German governments had different concepts
of ‘power relations’ (p. 33). British attitudes to the West German
governments were based ‘on control, dominance, and alliance diplomacy’,
whereas West German European policy pursued ‘national
interests’ by ‘sharing power’ inside European institutions (p. 34).
Deighton implicitly acknowledges the influence of ‘soft’ factors like
historical experience and national images for the policy-making
process, and also the role of economic motives behind the integration
project. Yet this is a highly traditional treatment of the diplomatic
relations between two national governments, which is hardly integrated
into the respective domestic political contexts. Deighton does
not even acknowledge how problematic it is to speak of supposedly
‘German’ ‘national interests’ when the nation was in fact divided and
Adenauer’s policy of Western integration highly contested in West
German politics, at least until 1955–7. As she does not read German
and therefore has no access to anything published in the German language,
her chapter also illustrates the inadequacy of writing about
bilateral relations from a unilateral perspective. Deighton suggests,
for example, that Adenauer suddenly switched from an ‘Atlanticist’
to a ‘Gaullist’ perspective in the autumn of 1962 (p. 28), when West
95